Milo nodded. He looked back through the inspection plate Vadim had hauled him in through. Below, far below, now he lad a better angle, he could see the massive turning blades of the fan. Whup! Whup! Whup! “Feth—” he breathed. He looked back. “Where’s Bonin?”
“Here,” said the scout, emerging from the shadows. Bonin and Vadim had gone down first. “Wasn’t easy, was it?” Bonin asked, as if it had been a walk in the fields.
Vadim nudged Milo aside and reached into the vent again, pulling out Lillo, whose face was pink and sweaty with fear and exertion.
“Never again…” Lillo murmured, crouching down to rest and wiping his brow.
“I don’t think we should bring anyone else down,” Vadim said to Bonin. “It’s taking too long.” Bonin nodded and activated his micro-bead. “You hear me, Shoggy?”
“Go ahead. Are you down?”
“Yeah, all four of us. Rest of you stay put for now. It’s no easy ride. We’ll scope around and see if we can’t find a proper roof access to let you in by.”
“Understood. Don’t take too long.”
The four Ghosts checked their lasrifles and unwrapped their camo-cloaks. They were inside Cirenholm’s vapour mill now, moving along the gantries and catwalks like shadows. The thunderous purring of the main turbines covered the slight sounds they made as they spread out.
Bonin gestured them into cover, then waved Vadim and Milo forward. They had reached a main deck area suspended over the primary drums of the turbines. The air was damp and smelled of oil and burned dust.
Lillo crossed the other way at Bonin’s signal. When he was in place, Bonin started forward again.
He spotted a skeletal stairwell that looked promising. Roof access, perhaps.
Bonin got in cover behind a bulkhead and signalled the others forward. Lillo drew up to flank the scout, and Vadim and Milo hurried past, making for the end of the deck walkway.
Milo dropped again, but Vadim moved on. Milo cursed silently. The Verghastite had moved too far and broken rhythm of the smooth, bounding cover they were setting.
“Vadim!” he hissed over his link.
Vadim heard him and stopped, realising he had gone too far. He looked for good cover and hurried round into the mouth of an airlock.
The airlock hatch suddenly opened.
Light flooded out.
Vadim turned and found himself face to face with six Blood Pact warriors.
In the gloom, Milo saw the abruptly spreading patch of light shine out from the airlock where Vadim had gone to ground.
A moment later, Vadim flew into view, diving frantically headlong, firing his lasrifle behind him with one hand.
A burst of answering las-fire exploded out after him. Milo saw the gleaming red bolts sizzling in the air, spanking off the grille deck and a hoist assembly, and snapping the handrail of the deck. He wasn’t sure where Vadim had ended up, or if he’d been hit.
“Vadim? Vadim?”
Several figures moved out of the airlock onto the deck, fast and proficient in a combat spread. Milo glimpsed red battle-dress, gleaming crimson helmets, the glint of black ammo-webbing, and dark faces that looked like they had been twisted into tortured expressions of pain. Two of them fired from the hatchway, down the length of the deck, providing protective fire for the others who ran out into the open.
Milo raised his weapon, but Bonin’s terse voice came over the micro-link. “Milo! Hold fire and stay low! Lillo… open up from where you are!”
Milo looked behind him. Lillo was further back down the deck than either himself or Bonin. The Verghastite started firing on semi-auto, squirting quick bursts of fire at the figures emerging from the airlock. The shots streamed down the deckway past Milo at hip height.
The enemy troops immediately focused their attention on Lillo, firing at him and moving down the deck towards him, hugging cover. Milo could see Bonin’s simple but inspired tactic at once. Lillo was drawing the enemy out, stringing them between Milo and Bonin’s firing positions.
“Wait… Wait…” Bonin murmured.
The enemy were closer now. Milo could see their faces were in fact metal masks, cruel and rapacious. He could smell the stink of their sweat and unwashed clothes. These have to be Blood Pact he thought.
“Wait…”
Milo was crouched so low his legs were beginning to cramp. His skin crawled. He tightened his grip on his lasrifle. Laser bolts criss-crossed the air around him — blue-white from Lillo’s Imperial weapon, flame-red from the Chaos guns.
“Now!”
Milo swept round and fired. His ripple of shots punched into a bulkhead, missing the Blood Pact trooper who hunched against it. The masked warrior whipped around at the now close source of opposition and Milo corrected his hasty aim, putting two rounds into the enemy’s face.
Bonin had opened up too, deftly cutting down two of the Blood Pact as they were crossing for better cover and a better angle on Lillo.
A sudden silence. By Milo’s reckoning, there were still three of them left. He could hear one creeping slowly towards the row of fuel drums concealing Bonin, but his own cover blocked his view. Milo got down and slowly pulled himself round on his belly. He could almost see his target. A shadow on the deck showed that the trooper was almost on top of Bonin.
Milo lunged out of cover, firing twice. He hit the Blood Pact trooper and sent him tumbling over, wildly firing the full-auto burst he had been saving for Bonin.
There was a fierce cry. Milo looked round to see another of the Blood Pact charging him, shooting. Las-rounds exploded off the plating behind him, nicking the stock of Milo’s weapon and burning through his left sleeve.
Bonin appeared out of nowhere, leaping off the barrels full length. He smashed into the charging foe, the impact carrying them both over hard into the deck’s handrail. The scout threw a savage uppercut, and his silver warknife was clenched in his punching fist. Screaming, the enemy clutched his neck and face and fell backwards off the deck.
A single las-shot rang out. The last Blood Pact trooper had been running back for the airlock. Lillo had cut him down with one, well-judged round.
Lillo hurried forward. “Check the airlock,” Bonin told him, wiping his blade clean before sheathing it.
“Thanks,” said Milo. “I thought he’d got me.”
“Forget it,” smiled Bonin. “I’d never have got that one sneaking up on me.”
They joined Lillo at the airlock. “Think we got them all. This one’s an officer, I think.” He kicked the body of the one he had brought down in flight.
“Where’s Vadim?” Milo asked.
They looked round. Desperate for cover, Vadim had thrown himself out of the airlock hatchway. It seemed to all three of them that in his panic, Vadim had gone clean off the edge of the deck into space.
“Hey!”
Milo got down and looked over the rail. Vadim was swinging by one hand from one of the deck’s support members about five metres down. “Feth!” said Milo. “Get a rope!”
Sonin searched the bodies of the dead Blood Pact, and bund a ring of digital keys in the pocket of the officer’s coat.
“Sorry,” Vadim said to everyone, now back on the deck. “Got a bit ahead of myself.”
Bonin said nothing. He didn’t have to. Vadim knew his mistake.
They approached the massive metal staircase and followed t up into the roof space. The captured keys let them through locked cage doors one by one. It would have taken them tours to cut or blow their way through.
At the top of the stairwell there was a greasy metal platform with a ladder up to a ceiling hatch. Bonin climbed up and tried the keys until he found one that disengaged the blast-proof lock on the hatch. “Hoods,” he advised, and all four of them struggled back into their rebreathers before he opened the hatch. Orange hazard lights began spinning and flashing around the platform as the hatch opened to the night and freezing air billowed in. “Someone’s going to notice this,” Lillo said. There was no helping it. Time was aga
inst them. The team they’d taken out would be missed soon anyway.
Bonin climbed out onto the roof and voxed to Domor and the main force. It took about fifteen minutes for them to struggle up through the mill’s superstructure and get into the hatch. Bonin sent the first few troopers to arrive down the stairwell with Milo and Lillo to secure the base and the access to the deck. As soon as the last man was inside, Bonin closed and relocked the hatch. The hazard flashers shut down.
Down on the deck, those troopers — like Seena and Arilla — who had come through the drop crash minus weapons helped themselves to the battered, old-pattern lascarbines belonging to the Blood Pact. Avoiding the airlock, they continued on down the stairwell until they reached the main floor of the turbine chamber. It was dark and oily, with a low-level smog of exhaust smoke, but the darkness and the noise swallowed them up. Mkeller and Bonin, working from the map, snaked them through the sump levels of the mill, between the turbine frames, under walkframes, over coils of pressurised pipes. Moisture dripped down, and unwholesome insect vermin scuttled in the corners.
Somewhere high above them, light shone out. The Ghosts froze. Light from an opened hatch or airlock spread out across one of the upper catwalks, and they saw a line of figures hurrying along the walk onto a raised deck level. A moment later, and more light appeared. Another group, more soldiers, lamps bobbing as they crossed an even higher walkway, moving to support the first.
Bonin and Milo had dumped the Blood Pact dead off the deck into the darkness of the sump, but there had been no disguising the las-damage to the deck area.
Once it seemed safe to move again, they filed along the narrow companionways of the sump, and reached an inner hatch that opened with a turn of the digital keys.
In fireteam formations now, Jagdea protected in one of the middle groups, they went through into a main service corridor, round in cross-section with heavy girder ribs. Dull blue lights glowed out of mesh boxes along the backbone of the roof.
The corridor wound away, passing junctions, crossways, stairwells and elevator hatches. Haller grew increasingly uncomfortable, and he could see it in the faces of the Verghastites too. It was a maze. They’d turned so many times, he wasn’t even sure of basic compass orientation anymore. But the Tanith seemed confident. Corbec had once told Haller that the Tanith couldn’t get lost. It wasn’t in their genes, he reckoned. Something to do with the perpetually mystifying pathways of that homeworld forest they were forever banging on about.
Now he believed it. Bonin, who like all the Tanith scouts had a grim-set face that never seemed to find much to be cheerful about, didn’t even consult the map anymore. He paused occasionally to check stencilled wall signs, and once backed them up and rerouted them up a level via a stairwell. But his confidence never wavered.
They came at last to a small side hall that seemed particularly dingy and long out of use. They were, by Haller’s estimation, in the very basement levels of the city dome, lower even than the mill sump levels. Racks of old, cob-webbed work coveralls and crates of surplus industrial equipment had been stacked there out of the way. Most of the rooflights had gone. There was a door at the far end. A metal hatch, painted blue with a flaking white serial stencil.
Bonin paused, and looked over at Mkeller. The other scout, an older man with greying hair shaved in close to the sides of his head, returned the look with a nod.
“What is this?” whispered Haller.
“Rear service access to the mill’s main control chamber.”
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t need to open the door to prove it’s the rear service access to the mill’s main control chamber, if that’s what you mean, sir.”
“Okay, okay…” Haller glanced at Domor. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s the closest thing to a target that we’re going to get. Unless you’d care to hide in these sub-basements until, oh, I don’t know… the end of time?”
Haller smiled. “Point taken. And as our beloved colonel-commissar is so fond of saying… do you want to live forever?”
The blast ripped down the length of the stateroom, shredding the painted wood panelling, dashing up the polished floor tiles and tearing one of the crystal chandeliers off the roof. The chandelier crashed and rolled like a felled, crystal tree. Its twin wilted and swayed from the ceiling.
The wispy blue smoke began to clear.
Gaunt blinked away the tears that the smoke had welled up, and coughed to clear his throat. He looked around.
Though some were brushing litter off themselves, the Ghosts in his squad seemed to have weathered the powerful explosion.
“Form and point, by threes. Let’s go!” Gaunt growled over his micro-bead. “Soric, watch our behinds.”
“Read you, sir,” crackled Soric’s reply. His squad, along with those of Theiss, Ewler and Skerral, were dug in at their heels, holding off the mounting assaults of the Blood Pact.
Drawing his sword and powering it up, Gaunt ran forward with Derin and Beltayn, following the lead team of Caober, Wersun and Starck. Debris crunched underfoot. Gaunt’s boot caught a crystal twig of chandelier and it went tinkling away across the dust.
Before he’d even reached the grand doorway at the end, he heard Caober’s snarl of frustration and knew what it meant. The shield was still intact. They’d brought down the entire frontice of the doorway, frame and all, with the combined tube charges and det-sticks of the entire platoon and still the energy screen fizzled at them, untroubled.
“Sir?” asked Beltayn.
Gaunt thought fast. There had been a protocol for retiring — Tactician Biota had coded it “Action Blue Magus”—but there was no point giving that signal. They were penned into the outer levels of the secondary dome by the shield wall to one side and the Blood Pact to the other. There was nowhere to retire to, and no hope of calling up an evac. Even if the drop fleet had returned to the drogue and refuelled, as they were supposed to do, the enemy held the DZ now, the only viable landing zone.
Biota had expected them to win, Gaunt thought. Dammit, he had expected them to win. Cirenholm should have been tough, but not this fething tough. They had seriously underestimated the resolve and strategic strength of the Blood Part.
Gaunt took the mic from Beltayn.
“One to close units, by mark 6903. Shield is not breached. Repeat not breached. Stand by.”
He consulted his data-slate chart, as Beltayn hurried to import updated troop positions from his vox-linked auspex. It was tight. Too tight. The Ghosts were entirely hemmed in by the enemy, and they were slowly being squeezed to death against the shield line.
With virtually no room to play with, Gaunt knew he had to make the best of what defensive positions he had.
“This is one,” Gaunt continued. “Soric, Theiss, Skerral, hold your line. Ewler, angle west. The chart shows a service well two hundred metres to your right. I want it blocked and covered. Maroy, hold and provide protective fire for Ewler’s move. Confirm.”
They did so in a rapid stutter of overlapped responses.
“One, further… Burone, you hear me?”
“Sir!”
“What’s it like there?”
“Low intensity at present, sir. I think they’re trying to flank us.”
“Understood. Try not to lose any more ground. Fall back no further than junction hall 462.”
“Four six two, confirmed.”
“Tarnash, Mkfin, Mkoll. Try to spread south to the vestibule at 717. There’s a series of chambers there that look like they could be held.”
“Understood, sir,” replied Mkfin.
“Read you, one,” said Mkoll.
“Tarnash? This is one. Confirm.”
Crackling noise.
“Tarnash?”
Gaunt looked at Beltayn, who was adjusting the tuning dial. The harried vox-officer shook his head. “One, twenty?”
“Go ahead, one.”
“Soric, Tarnash may be down, which means there may be a dangero
us hole in your left flank.”
“We stand advised, sir.”
“Mkendrick, Adare… press your gain to the right. Soric needs the cover.”
“Understood, sir. It’s fething hot this way,” Adare responded.
“Do your best. Wix, you still holding that loading dock?”
“Down to our last dregs of ammo, sir. We can give you ten minutes’ resistance at best before it comes down to fists and blades.”
“Selective five, Wix. Use your damn tube charges, if you have to.”
A transmission cut across abruptly. “Ten-fifty, one!”
“Go ahead, Indrimmo.”
The Verghastite’s voice was frantic. Gaunt could hear rat-ding autofire over the link. “We’re out! My squad is out! Count zero on all las! Gak! They’re on all sides now, we—”
“Indrimmo! Indrimmo! One, ten-fifty!”
“Channel’s dead, sir,” murmured Beltayn.
Gaunt looked desperately back at the shield, the real enemy. It was denying him every possibility of constructing a workable defence. For a moment, he considered striking at the cursed shield with his power sword, but he knew that was no way to finish the life of Heironymo Sondar’s noble weapon.
“Ideas?” he asked Caober.
The scout shook his head. “All I figure is this shield system must be running off the city power supply. It must be sucking up a feth of a lot of juice to stay this coherent.”
Gaunt had worked that much out. If only he could reach the spearhead, Varl, Obel and Kolea… if they were still alive. Maybe they could hit in as far as the vapour mill and…
No. That was just wishful thinking. If the three squads of the spearhead were still alive, they’d be fighting for their lives now, alone in the heart of the enemy-held dome. Even if the shields hadn’t been blocking their vox-broadcasts and he could talk to them, hoping they could storm the mill was futile.
Gaunt snapped round from his reverie, as what seemed like a grenade blast ruptured in across the stateroom from the left. Before the smoke had even cleared, he saw red-dad figures moving through the breach in the shattered wall.